Trans-Alaska Pipeline: Impact Study Receives Bad Reviews

A roadmap for a quantitative ecosystem-based environmental impact assessment

“…Leopold et al produced their brief document at the request of the US Department of the Interior after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) created a legal obligation for federally funded projects to assess impact. In the year following the passage into law, the scientific community was quick to point out the absence of any accepted protocol for either the content of the document or its evaluation (see characterisation in Gillette, 1971). In response, Leopold et al describes a preliminary approach, with a simple decision-tree like diagram ( Figure 1A) relying on structured information tables.…”

“…EIAs therefore embody a compromise between technical descriptions of the expected magnitude of an impact on a receptor and managerial recommendations about how to avoid that receptors exceed acceptable values, or mitigate, identified impacts (Lawrence, 1997;Cashmore et al, 2010;Barker and Jones, 2013). By 1971, under pressure to move development projects forward (Gillette, 1971), the EIA process became institutionalised as a qualitative exercise focussed on collecting documentation about a project site supported by individuals' professional expertise, without requiring quantitative evaluations to back up statements (Lawrence, 1997;Cashmore et al, 2010;Morgan, 2012;Toro et al, 2013). Hence EIAs today still strongly resemble the preliminary instructions given by Leopold et al (Figure 1B).…”